ATI radeon xpress 200

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Tiburon

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A friend of mine just purchased a new computer with a ATI radeon xpress 200. Is this good enough to run BF2?
 
Yea, it's probally the bare minimum, so as long as your friend isn't bothered by very low settings you should alright.
 
I wouldn't count on it playing BF 2 at any type of acceptable frame rates. He will more likely end up frustrated more than anything. I had one in a laptop and it was barely able to play CS:S at 800x600 min settings. Shell out some cash for a video card.... x200 = ATI 9000
 
gsboriqua said:
x200 = ATI 9000
Click to expand...
It's more like 1/2 of a 9600/9600SE. The integrated graphics in the XPRESS 200 chipset supports SM2.0, the 9000 only supports up to PS1.4.
 
Depends which mobo manufacturer/brand of mobo he bought from.

Regular XPress200 chipset mobos don't generally have onboard ram on them. Their performance really is quite unacceptable.

If you have one of the XPress200 motherboards with 32mb of 'onboard' ram though, it'll do ATI's "Hypermemory" trick and act damn near identical to an X300 SE add-on card.

Still very, very budget (IE., 'low' details, 800x600 in BF2...higher settings in most other games, though, but rarely any higher resoution), but workable. For someone who isn't a hardcore gamer, probably even a GOOD solution.
 
My Turion 64 version( 2ghz 604mb ram 128 vga shared) runs the demo at 1024x 768 with low settings pretty well, maybe textures a little higher....
 
dderidex said:
If you have one of the XPress200 motherboards with 32mb of 'onboard' ram though, it'll do ATI's "Hypermemory" trick and act damn near identical to an X300 SE add-on card.
Click to expand...
I had the mobile version with 128MB dedicated memory PLUS HyperMemory (dual channel S939 HP zv6000 brick), and at best it was 75% of a X300SE. The desktop boards are worse than that since they have much less local memory.

The problem isn't just memory bandwidth or local memory size. The "Radeon x200" core in the XPRESS 200/200M chipset is a severely cut down 9600/X300 core:
9600SE/x300SE: 4 pipelines (1 texture unit per pipeline)
"x200": 2 pipelines (1 texture unit per pipeline)
It's pretty obvious why ATI chose a lower number (x200) for this core. :p http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2004/4796.html

It's virtually impossible for a XPRESS 200/200M chipset to be "damn near identical to an X300 SE" with only 1/2 the pipelines. I've owned both and the XPRESS 200/200M is noticeably inferior even in the best case (about 75% of the x300SE, and the x300SE is a pretty weak chip as it is).
 
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